


A Whisper on the Wind

by StarsInMyDamnEyes



Category: Wiedźmin | The Witcher (Video Game), Wiedźmin | The Witcher - All Media Types
Genre: Anyways, Case Fic, Cerys is Queen of Skellige (she’s the only valid choice cmon), F/F, It’s not a good plot but it’s a plot, Plot-heavy, Post-Canon, The Skellige Isles (The Witcher), Witcher Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, Witcher Contracts, apart from the murder this is very soft, i can’t not include Witcher Satan, no beta we die like stregobor fucking should have, they’re lesbians your honour, this is soft, unsubtle allusions to Gaunter O’Dimm, wrong canon oh well he still should have died
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-07-04
Updated: 2020-07-04
Packaged: 2021-03-04 18:21:34
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,337
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25070821
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/StarsInMyDamnEyes/pseuds/StarsInMyDamnEyes
Summary: The chilly, Skellige air was sharp against the skin of Ciri’s face, and she welcomed it wholeheartedly. The salty tang of the ocean at the back of her throat, carried on the biting winds that cut across the harbour that the sailing barge she was disembarking had docked in.It was a nice change, from the sweltering Toussaint summer and the muggy Kaedweni autumn, and Ciri welcomed it. Chasing contracts in such oppressive heat had been rather annoying, in and of itself, and the bitter chill in the sea air, a sign of the shifting seasons, was a refreshing break.Or: Ciri goes to Skellige for the winter.
Relationships: Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon/Cerys an Craite
Comments: 26
Kudos: 69
Collections: The Witcher Flash Fic Challenge #003





	A Whisper on the Wind

**Author's Note:**

> i play fast and loose with canon because i do what i want
> 
> Content Warnings:  
> \- pretty blatant ephebophelia (attraction to older teenagers; is still disgusting)  
> \- the inherent ethical problems of tricking someone’s mind to perceive you as attractive against their will  
> \- some misogyny so that i can have ciri’s internal monologue be frustrated at the misogyny in tw3 because oh boy that’s Not Fun

The chilly, Skellige air was sharp against the skin of Ciri’s face, and she welcomed it wholeheartedly. The salty tang of the ocean at the back of her throat, carried on the biting winds that cut across the harbour that the sailing barge she was disembarking had docked in.

It was a nice change, from the sweltering Toussaint summer and the muggy Kaedweni autumn, and Ciri welcomed it. Chasing contracts in such oppressive heat had been rather annoying, in and of itself, and the bitter chill in the sea air, a sign of the coming winter, was a refreshing break.

She turned back around and grinned up at the captain of the barge just once, tossing him a half-mocking salute as she made her was away from the shore, two swords on her back - steel and silver, as tradition dictated - the wrong school’s medallion sitting proudly on her chest. There were always bound to be contracts in Skellige, or some other kind of work that she could occupy herself with for the winter, and so Ciri had made the trip from Kerack as winter approached, making it into port before the storms got strong enough to be properly inconvenient.

It was a strange winter, this one - entirely bereft of their usual custom, after the battle of Kaer Morhen. She’d spent entirely too much time at Corvo Bianco over the summer months with Geralt, and nobody much felt like spending the season at the old keep as was customary, as far as she knew.

Not without Vesemir, at least.

She pushed down the thought - it wouldn’t do her any good to dwell on it, and get lost in her own thoughts again - as she made her way towards the nearest settlement past the harbour. Letting the raw grief rise in her chest would do her no favours whatsoever.

Originally, she’d planned on having a day’s rest before taking on any contracts, kicking up her feet and having a bit to drink, but the barge had pulled into the harbour in the early hours of the morning, rather than the late afternoon she’d expected, and Ciri wasn’t about to let a whole day go to waste - never mind that no sane person drinks while the sun was still rising.

Skellige was, as Ciri had suspected, seemingly more than willing to hire a witcher to solve various problems - with various reports of disappearances, all reported as separate incidents, much to her amused frustration - and she supposed she had a contract secured easily enough, off the first notice-board, in fact, that she bumped into.

It seemed like a standard enough contract, with people going missing localised to a certain area - likely a monster, on the hunt. It shouldn’t be too complicated to deal with, provided she kept her wits about her - unlike Geralt and the others, she didn’t have to do as much physical preparation for a hunt; the potions she’d studied at Kaer Morhen, used by the more conventional members of her trade and effective against various monsters, had not, unfortunately, ceased being highly toxic to her, sans mutation as she was.

It wasn’t that severe a disadvantage, not with Ciri’s own, specific skill-set, and it saved her quite some hassle.

Still, Ciri was in no way exempt from preparation, when it came to a contract. It was an exceptionally imbecilic move to charge into battle against an unknown creature, magic, mutations, or not.

Ergo, an investigation was, as always, warranted.

“Excuse me,” Ciri said, trying to catch the attention of a passer-by, a burly Skelliger man with an unpleasant expression on his face. “Do you happen to know who posted this contract? Arne?”

The fellow grunted. “Aye, I know Arne, it’ll be his daughter that’s gone missing latest. He put up a contract after, and I asked him, who the fuck’s around who’ll take it?”

His watery eyes narrowed as he looked Ciri up and down, studying her, her light armour - far too light by any reasonable standard - and her weaponry, his gaze finally dropping to the cat medallion on her chest - the one she’d liberated from Bonhart, that denoted the wrong school entirely.

Ciri raised an eyebrow.

“Ye a witcher?”

“I am.”

The man furrowed his brow. “Ye ain’t got the eyes. Talk’s that witchers have cat eyes, yellow ones.”

“Maybe I’m just special.”

“Aye. Or maybe ye’re a con.”

“Maybe I am, maybe I’m not,” Ciri shrugged, the evenness in her tone most definitely strained. “But why hurl accusations when I only want to help? Besides, it’s not your contract, it’s Arne’s. I only asked where I could find him.”

A huff. “Down that street, third house on the right. Got the horse tethered outside the stoop, like an idiot. Man shouldn’t be owning a horse, if that’s how he treats it.”

“Right, thank you.”

The man grunted gruffly and went on his was, while Ciri - in a moment of immaturity - stuck her tongue out at his retreating back.

What a dick.

She turned tail and set off towards Arne’s supposed residence, which was easy enough to find, given that there was, indeed, a horse tethered to the meagre porch of the house - a place where a horse should not, Ciri was certain, should be tethered, what with the fact that it was a horse, and horses did not generally do well when chained to a stone house on a stone street.

The wood of the door was sturdy, and her knock made a dull sound as she rapped cold knuckles against it. The weather was always cold in Skellige - she remembered, vaguely, the discussions and visits from when she’d been the Princess of Cintra still. It made sense, what with the geographical location, and the bitter winds blowing in from the sea that lay to the west, and it was a nice break from the muggy humidity of the continent’s summer.

A tall, dark-haired man - presumably Arne - opened the door with a hesitancy that was rather out of place for a Skelliger, what with their reputation for brashness and aggressiveness, and blinked at Ciri.

“What brings you here?”

“Your horse shouldn’t be tied to the front of your house,” Ciri opens, tone agreeable. “Is this your contract?”

“I’m-” Arne’s eyes dart to the horse. “Yes, it is.”

“What can you tell me about it?”

“Why?”

There it was, that glare - the glare that people so often enjoyed levelling at her, for the two swords on her back, though whether it was for her trade as a witcher or for that fact that the witcher was _her_ , she didn’t know.

Ciri resisted the urge to frown. “I’m a witcher. I’m taking the contract.”

For a moment, it looked like Arne was going to protest, offer some kind of paltry reason as to why she shouldn’t, or worse, _couldn’t_ , as if she were just some child playing dress-up and not someone who had trained and fought for years, someone who had earned the right to bear steel and silver, and a medallion around her neck - but then he deflated, and nodded.

“My daughter’s gone missing.”

“Your daughter and how many others?”

Arne shrugged. “Ten, twelve? I’ve no idea. They’re all girl from the town, _Sir Witcher_ -” Ciri would dearly have like to smack him for the derision his tone was laced with “-and they’ve not wandered off nowhere they shouldn’t have gone.”

“And you know this... how?”

“Because none of them ever left the fucking village on their own, did they? It was always errands, or walks, that they went missing, left the fucking house and never came back!”

Ciri shifted, still standing on the porch, beside the horse. Arne, for all his apparent desperation to find his daughter that had pushed him to post the contract, was steadfastly picky about where the help came from, it seemed, and Ciri wanted nothing further to do with either him or his meek demeanour that gave way to scorn the moment he laid eyes on her, indicative of several things, none of which were pleasant - but a contract was a contract.

“No struggle?” Ciri queried. “No violence, no signs of a fight anywhere?”

“Not a fucking lick.”

“So they were presumably lured.”

“Apparently.”

The witcher ignored the derision with confidence. “Do you have a rough estimate as to when the girls went missing?”

“The fuck do I look like, a journal? Just bring me back my Yrsa, _witcher_ , and I’ll pay you.”

“How much?”

“Sixty ducats.”

Ridiculous.

“Two hundred and fifty.”

“Eighty.”

“Two hundred and fifty-one.”

“Fuck you,” Arne snarled.

Ciri raised an eyebrow. “Two hundred and sixty.”

“I’ll give you a hundred ten. That’s fucking it.”

“Fine,” and that was rather magnanimous of her, all things considered. They didn’t shake on it - of course they didn’t, Arne hadn’t even let her into his house for the negotiations - and Ciri went on her way.

* * *

She’d expected the contract to be relatively straightforward, simple, even if it was likely that it wasn’t Yrsa but Yrsa’s corpse that Arne would be welcoming back.

It was not straightforward at all.

Tracking down whatever had lured the girls away was going to be hard work. At a first glance, whatever it was left no traces, and at second glance, Ciri had seen no sign of any creature at all. Third glance suggested that she should perhaps not order an ale from the nearby tavern, given the mold growing on the barrels, and the fourth told her that she was most likely wasting her time. Whatever information there was to be found, Ciri wouldn’t find it in the grotty streets where Yrsa or any of the other girls had last been seen, and so she supposed that she should resign herself to examining the rest of everywhere, or try to puzzle things out based on context clues.

She may not have had a Witcher’s enhanced senses, but Ciri was a fine enough detective in her own right, and the utter lack of information was troubling her. She’d looked, as closely as she could, for even the faintest sign of something out of the ordinary, for traces of a foglet’s presence, or perhaps the lingering chaos of a particularly charming monster’s call, but there was nothing.

Fuck all.

Anywhere.

The first flakes of snow had begun to fall from the sky, and still, Ciri was no closer to deciphering what kind of monster had taken the girls.

 _Think_.

There were no physical clues, no tracks left behind by the monster. That was fine. Ciri could work with that. The bestiaries she’d memorised at Kaer Morhen had not slipped her mind as she aged, entries as clear in her mind as they were the day Vesemir had first gone over them with her and had her recite them all by rote.

There were no physical clues. That didn’t mean that there weren’t any clues.

It targeted girls - young and beautiful girls, apparently, according to the gossip she’d half-eavesdropped on earlier - and only girls, as far as Ciri knew. Such a kind of pickiness regarding victims suggested intelligence enough to form detailed preferences, for whatever reason, so foglets were definitely out, as well as most anything that wasn’t sentient.

Too, it was able to lure people from the streets without anyone being any the wiser - that suggested stealth. Something that could disguise itself as a human, or cloak its presence entirely, slipping in the crowd. Perhaps it was some kind of mimic, perhaps it had the aid of invisibility, or a glamour; perhaps it could simply blend in to human society entirely, like a higher vampire.

If it _was_ a higher vampire, Ciri was going to quadruple her fees.

Whatever it was, the creature was sentient and could blend in with human society, and Ciri _would_ have congratulated herself for her foresight had it not been for the depressing fact that such parameters were still absurdly broad.

The snow had started falling properly, by then, the flakes almost invisible where they clung to Ciri’s ashen hair.

And then, a voice filled the streets, screaming and crying out, a name on the the tongue of the hoarse young girl, calling out for her sister.

Fucking _hell_.

It had been _right there_ , only moments ago, and Ciri had missed it.

* * *

The girl - and whatever, or _whoever_ \- had lured her, still had to be in the area, at least. Ciri would have, she was certain, noticed if they had attempted a more long-distance kind of escape - she had some kind of sense, for that, just passively, a faint feeling of knowing when something had shifted through space the way she herself often did, and, more to the point, nothing _had_.

The girl was still screaming, and Ciri half-wished she had the time to go over what the girl looked like, but she had no time, she was losing time as she stood.

Her eyes darted over the crowd, trying to catch the odd one out. A father and his son, walking amiably down the street, two friends, keeping up a stream of amiable banter, an innkeeper and one of his staff hefting barrels, a young woman, shifting as she walked, trying to communicate _interest_ and _attraction_ to a particularly waify Skelliger lad dressed in loose rags-

And Ciri had an inordinately bad feeling about it.

She would, if asked, place money on him being the creature she sought. Attraction was so often repurposed as a tool to ensnare a victim - she’d seen it happen so many times that it was practically formulaic.

Scratch that, it was written in Vesemir’s old books, for crying out loud. It _was_ formulaic.

So Ciri followed them.

Keeping to the shadows as best she could, Ciri tracked after the man and the girl, who moved so fluidly and effortlessly through the crowd that it was no _wonder_ that nobody had noticed the girls go missing, what with them just simply walking away in broad daylight, seemingly of their own volition.

Seemingly. Ciri did wonder why nobody had picked up on any common thread tying the disappearances together, like, perhaps, a too-skinny-to-not-be-noticeable Skelliger lad making off with the girls at his heel.

Perhaps they just hadn’t been paying attention.

Ciri followed them, as they ducked through streets, and made their way out of the city where the snow had settled, and it would, for any _other_ witcher, be hell to try and avoid leaving proof that they were tracking them.

Luckily, Ciri was no ordinary, run-of-the-mill witcher, and she had a trick ready for this kind of situation.

She let herself fall back, a bit too far for comfort, to at least muffle the ever-so-faint traces of chaos that manifested visibly whenever she shifted through space, and kept herself behind cover. It was a tad inconvenient, but it would leave no tracks.

She felt the familiar tug deep within her as she let herself be pulled through the world at her own behest, shifting from behind a sturdy holly bush to a tree quite a way on. Her range with this technique was still annoyingly limited - she needed to train more, damn it - but cover was plentiful, and it was quick work tracking the pair.

They made their way through snow and thicket, Ciri on their tail, before reaching a little building, a ramshackle hut in the middle of nowhere, that the man - for he was a man, judging by his face, a man far too old for a girl the age of the one following him - led his... led his _prey_ into.

Ciri slipped through the fabric of the world one more time before coming to a rest pressed against the flimsy wall, the sounds of a flirtatious conversation bleeding through it, the girl’s soft and sultry tone overwhelmingly domination the conversation by virtue of being the only voice speaking, and then the man spoke.

“No.”

Well, that was interesting. No? Hadn’t he lured the girl with him? Had Ciri gotten it wrong? But then, why the shack?

“No, no!” the voice of the man continued. “Wrong! You’re wrong, you’re doing it wrong! You’re not _there!_ You don’t love me, you _bitch_ , you fucking _whore_ , just look at your hollow eyes!”

Fucking hell, monster or not - Ciri drew her sword, steel for humans, and darted through the feeble entrance, too late to stop the man from bringing a blade down into the woman’s - the _girl’s_ , she couldn’t have been older than seventeen - stomach.

 _Shit_.

Ciri let the man go, ignoring him in favour of running over to the girl who lay on the floor, an agonised scream tearing itself from her throat as she clutched at the dagger in her abdomen.

That looked bad. Ciri didn’t have an apothecary on hand to patch up a wound so deep, but she had the ability she would damn well _try_ , even if it ended up hurting like a motherfucker on this girl who had never in her life been hurt in such a manner before.

“It’s okay,” she soothed, _put pressure on the wound_ , the bastard had twisted the fucking dagger as he stabbed her - Ciri had been too late. “It’s okay, let me help you.”

The girl whimpered and sobbed where she lay. “Please, I don’t- Why would I- Why did he?”

“Shh,” Ciri whispered, pulling out a needle, thread, and a bottle of alcohol. “You’ll be okay. I’ve got you.”

* * *

She should have expected that the Queen of Skellige would take an interest in her findings regarding the disappearances, given the fact that the girl that she’d hobbled out of the shack with, carrying her over her shoulder once it became clear that she hadn’t the strength to walk on her own, was the latest in a line of twelve disappearances, all young girls, from an area that was becoming progressively larger.

It wasn’t _unsurprising_.

Her shock was really on her, Ciri knew, as she belatedly remembered Geralt telling her that he’d been on the Isles when Cerys an Craite had been crowned queen.

She just hadn’t though of that when she’d actually shown up to meet with her about the kidnappings - probably the murders, in fact, given the speed with which the man had been ready to draw a sword on the girl.

“Your Majesty,” Ciri said, lips dry.

Cerys an Craite was _beautiful_ , handsome in a way that few people really were. She carried herself with authority and grace, and Ciri- Ciri was incredibly distracted.

The Queen of Skellige looked Ciri over just once, her eyes lighting up with recognition. “Cirilla Fiona Elen Riannon, if I’m not mistaken. You’re the witcher who found the beast that’s been luring girls from the streets?”

“I am. You- you remember me?”

Cerys’ lips curved up in a small smile. “I do,” she said. “But there’s also the rumours to think of, the war, the Wild Hunt - I will admit that that’s more the reason I know you than a winter from so many decades ago.”

“Right, yeah, that’s logical. I mean- you _would_ know who I am from all that, it’s-”

“Geralt is hardly the only one whose reputation precedes them, you know,” Cerys said, a teasing edge to her tone - and Ciri really wished she wouldn’t do that, he didn’t need her brain to fly out the door completely - as her hazel eyes twinkled with mirth. “But, to the point. The beast.”

“It’s no beast, it’s a man. He- I don’t know how he does it, but he seduces them, and they follow him of their own will.”

“But their attraction’s false?”

It was asked as a question, but Ciri knew that was only to prompt her - Cerys had already drawn her own conclusion.

“Yes, the girl I spoke to said she had know idea why she felt- like that, towards the man. He’s middle-aged, anyways, and I’m inclined to think that adolescents wouldn’t pursue him of their own free will.”

“And the shack,” Cerys pressed. “Was there any clue there?”

“I’ve no idea, I had to leave quickly, with the girl.”

“Then we should go back.”

Ciri raised an eyebrow. “We?”

“Come off it, _witcher_ ,” Cerys snorted, though there was no malice behind the word. “If my people are in danger, it’s my duty to protect them, and don’t pretend the man’s not a significant danger. It’s been less than two weeks, and eleven people are dead.”

“It’s not a queen’s job.”

“It’s not a queen’s job to remove a threat to her people?”

Ciri sighed, though there was no real frustration behind it.

“I’ll show you to the shack.”

* * *

The man had not been very subtle in covering his crimes.

Beside the initial confusion as to where the girls had gone, and how they had been taken, there was very little covering his tracks now that Ciri knew where to look. There was a trapdoor in the shack, barely hidden under a threadbare rug so thoroughly stained in blood that the dark red splatters seemed almost like a pattern.

“At least he locked it,” Ciri mused, trying to pry it open and meeting resistance.

“At least?”

“Well, at least for _him_. He’s an utter failure of a criminal.”

“Do you deal with many of them?” Cerys asked, inspecting the lock over Ciri’s shoulder. “I’d thought witchers wouldn’t get involved in that kind of thing.”

“We hunt monsters,” Ciri huffed. “The rest of the Continent has grasp what that entails. I get more contracts begging me to act as private law enforcement than I do asking me to take care of any kind of curse or creature.”

“Do you take those contracts?”

“Not if I know to avoid it,” Ciri shrugged, abandoning the trapdoor in favour of searching for the key - failure of a criminal the man was, it was probably somewhere on the premises, given that his clothing, threadbare as it was, didn’t allow for storing it on him. “Witchers are supposed to stay neutral, and while that code went to shit when the war broke out, the general sentiment was that witchers weren’t supposed to take justice into our own hands, or act as arbiters of the law. We protect people from monsters, and get paid, that’s supposed to be it. Nobody needs a witcher dictating justice to them.”

“And yet, from what I’ve seen, your school especially has been skewing very politically, especially in the last few years.” Cerys’ eyes lingered on the cat medallion on Ciri’s chest. “Though I did think you were of the Wolves, given your association with Geralt.”

“I am. This wasn’t my medallion, originally - they don’t make new ones - I stole this off of Bonhart’s corpse, and let Geralt keep the wolf, what with how he’d lost his.”

Gods above, had Ciri actually been trying to impress the Queen with _that_ awkward little piece? How ridiculous. Yes, look at her, she was so cool - she looted medallions off of corpses!

“I mean,” she amended, hastily, “Bonhart had killed the witchers that the medallions belonged to, and-”

Cerys cut her off with a grin. “I got the gist of it.”

Ciri felt like she wanted to melt into a puddle and seep through the floorboards, just a little bit. In fact, she probably would do exactly that, if her cheeks got any hotter.

Hastily, she turned away.

“They key’s not in here,” she said, changing the subject.

“Are you sure?”

“Certain,” Ciri said. “But he can’t have had it on him, he must have a hiding place somewhere.”

“What makes you think that?”

“He had no pockets on him, nowhere to stash the key on him. He’s hidden it somewhere here, he must have.”

“Do you think he would have put it outside?”

“He seems stupid enough that he might have,” Ciri groused.

“Then what are we waiting for?”

Gods, the lilt in her voice was so pretty. Ciri was fucked.

The snow was deep, now, deep enough that they were completely and utterly screwed if the man had decided to bury the key, and Ciri would really rather not take an axe to the trapdoor and risk severe structural damage before she could properly investigate - not unless she absolutely had to.

But still, burying and digging up a trapdoor key seemed like such a hassle, and there were plenty of trees around for key-hiding purposes.

Even if, in Ciri’s personal opinion, hiding things indoors where the wind couldn’t blow them away made much more sense.

Her search took her around the back of the house, along with Cerys, who was scanning the other side of the ramshackle building’s surroundings, when a glint of silver caught her eyes - that was the fucking key, dangling from a fucking chain on a branch.

It was ornate - far more so, really, than was suited to the lock of a trapdoor in a run-down hut hidden away in the Skellige wilderness - but it matched the lock. That was not, she wanted to say, how one hid something in plain sight - there was an art to it, you didn’t just leave things lying around haphazardly.

Ciri reached out to take it, but Cerys got there first, fingers brushing against Ciri’s as her hand closed around the key.

“If he’s going to dangle it off a chain, he might as well wear it,” Cerys mused, pulling the chain free of the tree.

“I think he’s already proved that he’s not much of an intellectual.”

Cerys snorted quietly in amusement, and Ciri melted just a little bit more inside.

* * *

Neither of them had expected the trapdoor to lead to good things, per se, but the eleven decaying corpses dumped haphazardly on the floor, cut into pieces and dismembered and mutilated in every which way, was a bit much.

“Something tells me the man’s not entirely sound in the head,” Ciri murmured, fleetingly wondering why she hadn’t been able to smell this from the shack.

“You’re telling me,” Cerys said, surveying the scene in disgust.

And then, came the interruption. Footsteps, from above, and a faint curse - evidently, he’d seen the trapdoor.

Ciri was about to turn and confront the man when he lowered himself down into the basement himself.

“The fuck are you doing in my house?”

Drawing steel, Ciri turned. “You know, if you wanted to get away with this, you’d have legged it, not announced your presence.”

“Why are you here?”

Cerys raised an eyebrow, and let her gaze wander from the ragged man to the human remains he kept in his basement, and back again.

Ciri, despite the situation, felt herself falling a little bit more in love.

“That’s _different_ ,” the man spat. “That’s fucking _different_. He promised me that everyone I wanted would want me back, but they _don’t_ , they say they do but it’s fucking _hollow_ , there’s nothing behind it!”

Fucking hell.

 _Fucking hell_.

Ciri tried to keep her composure, but she couldn’t help the disgust bleeding into her voice as she asked. “Who promised?”

“The fucking mirror bastard! He swore that he’d make them love me, that anyone I loved would have to, but-”

“Shut up,” Cerys interrupted, voice low. “Shut up. You take these girls’ free will - and don’t think we didn’t notice a pattern in who you prey on, because Ciri and I both noticed that none of the girls were adults, yet - you strip them of their agency, and kill them when you notice that their so-called love is hollow? Of course it’s not real love - you put it there!”

“Fuck you,” the man spat, seemingly not chastised in the slightest - Ciri doubted he even recognised his queen.

“Your majesty,” Ciri said, filing away the man’s words. _The mirror bastard_ \- she was certain that Geralt had told her of someone that could be described that way. She’d have to make sure, but for now, she looked meaningfully at the steel sword in her hand. “May I?”

“I give you full permission,” Cerys said, cold anger evident in her voice. “My only regret is that I won’t be able to do it myself, but please, go on, witcher”

The word was said as a warning to the man, and it had its intended effect, as the man began to tremble.

“No- you _can’t_ , that’s illegal, witchers aren’t supposed to-”

“And the murderer preaches morals to his Queen,” Ciri said, dully. “How fascinating.”

“No, you can’t-”

Steel flashed through the air, and the man’s disgusting little head separated from his pitiful body in a swift motion, his warm blood splattering across the walls.

“Thank you, Ciri,” Cerys said, and immediately, warmth swelled in Ciri’s chest at the use of her nickname. “Did you have a contract for it?”

“Mhm. A less-than-pleasant man named Arne, who wanted his daughter back. Given the state of her, I don’t think I’ll be going back for payment, but the girls... They should at least have proper burials.”

“They should,” Cerys said, softly. “I’ll ensure it.”

“Are you alright?”

The Queen’s lips pressed together in a bitter smile. “You don’t need to worry about me, Ciri, as endearing as it is. We’ll bury the girls properly, and condemn this example of human depravity as a disgrace to all of Skellige and an affront to all that is good in the world.”

“Good. I’m glad.”

Ciri kicked the bastard’s head, viciously, into the wall, and Cerys huffed.

“And you... What will you do, now?”

“I don’t know. I came to Skellige for the winter with the intention of taking a few contracts, and I will.”

“Such is the life of a witcher, I suppose.”

The head rolled to a halt at Cerys’ feet, and she, too, took her turn punting it into the wall.

“You could stay with me,” she continued. “I’m aware we don’t know each other too well, but I- I enjoy your company.”

“I’d be glad to.”

Cerys smiled. “Thank you, Ciri. But, for now, we have a duty to these girls.”

Ciri nodded. “What are Skellige’s funerary customs?”

“Cremation. According to our customs, the smoke of the pyre will help guide them to the afterlife. They deserve that much, at least.”

There were eleven girls dead. Eleven too many.

* * *

As the smoke rose into the air, eleven pyres burning, eleven families mourning, Cerys came over to sit beside Ciri on the low wall from which she was watching the proceedings.

“We owe you a debt of gratitude,” she said. “Without you-”

Ciri cut her off with a wave of her hand. “I was just doing my job.”

“Be that as it may, we are thankful. I’m thankful. And you didn’t even get paid.”

“Arne was pissed enough at me from a distance for me to push my luck, but I don’t blame him. He didn’t like me to begin with, and he did just find out that his daughter just died.”

“Was it really your job, then, if you did it for no pay?”

“Charity work,” Ciri waved a hand. “It’s tax-deductible.”

Cerys shuffled a tad closer to Ciri, close enough that their shoulders were touching, and Ciri felt her traitorous heartbeat thundering in her chest.

“You’re a good person,” Cerys said. “You remind me of Geralt, he’s- oh, _fuck_ , that’s completely ruined the mood I was going for.”

Ciri laughed - _giggled_ , like a smitten teenager - and quirked a brow. “And what mood was that?”

Cerys, the Queen of Skellige, the woman who was responsible for the Isles’ prosperity, flushed bright red in embarrassment. “Intimate. Romantic. And then I brought up your dad.”

She groaned into her hands, clearly somewhat mortified, and avoided Ciri’s eyes, who in turn snapped to attention and focused her gaze on Cerys.

She only let her shock - the most wonderful shock she’d ever had - linger for a moment, before hesitantly leaning closer to Cerys, pressing their shoulders lightly together - close enough to be intimate but not so much that it was awkward or unwelcome.

“Don’t worry,” she said, her smirk turning into a genuine smile the moment she twitched her lips. “You’ve got all winter.”

**Author's Note:**

> I know 0 things about how romance works but blease accept my humble offerings


End file.
